Students of M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology participated in the '10th Annual Student Unmanned Air Systems' (SUAS) that was conducted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), and was recently held in Maryland, USA.
With the team name Edhitha, meaning 'progress in increments' in Sanskrit, the students came up with a unique idea for this competition.
Students from the mechanical engineering department worked on a project for more than a year before taking it international.
Team Edhitha consisted of Prateek Khanna, Prasanna Raghunathan, Vishnu B N, Rucha Naik, Deepthi Madhavan, Ranjith Siddhi and Ajay Vijayasarathy. The project was guided by S V Prakash, professor from the department of mechanical engineering, along with Prashanth T as the project mentor.
The team was awarded the 'Never Say Die' award, out of 42 international teams participating at the event.
"Students came up with innovative concepts and worked hard to convert their ideas into reality. It's an added advantage to think, create and compete on an international scale," explains S V Prakash, the professor of mechanical engineering at MSRIT.
"Unlike other international teams, which had access to high-end technology, our team used the available expertise and brought out an amazing product," he adds.
The competition was about building an unmanned air vehicle, which is capable of autonomous flight (auto piloted) and live imagery while airborne. The vehicle also had to identify some ground targets and determine their GPS coordinates via image processing and geo tagging.
The team made it through all three rounds of the competition, the first being the safety test, followed by an oral and journal presentation and finally the actual flight.
Although team Edhitha got a little unlucky with their first aircraft, which crashed due to radio interference from a local police broadcasting station, this did not break the spirit of the enthusiastic team. Instead, they took up the challenge of building a completely new plane overnight, without resting for even a minute. They successfully accomplished flight and live imagery.
Even though the team could not accomplish all that it wanted to after the crash, it put up a powerful fight in the competition.
"We were very disappointed after the plane crashed while testing but we managed to pull it together by travelling about 120 miles and building the plane from scratch," admits Vishnu. "It was an incredible experience and I believe our team has become much stronger now," he adds.
Having learnt from its experiences, the team has already made a few changes and is looking forward to continuing working on this concept diligently.
It aims to upgrade existing equipment and make it capable of achieving greater glories, for themselves, their college and their country.